Understanding Our Understanding of Strategic Scenarios: What Role Do Chunks Play?

There is a crucial debate concerning the nature of chess chunks: One current possibility states that chunks are built by encoding particular combinations of pieces-on-squares (POSs), and that chunks are formed mostly by "close" pieces (in a "Euclidean" sense). A complementary hypothesis is that chunks are encoded by abstract, semantic information. This article extends recent experiments and shows that chess players are able to perceive strong similarity between very different positions if the pieces retain the same abstract roles in both of them. This casts doubt on the idea that POS information is the key information encoded in chess chunks, and this article proposes, instead, that the key encoding involves the abstract roles that pieces (and sets of pieces) play-a theoretical standpoint in line with the research program in semantics that places analogy at the core of cognition.     

What is the nature of the mind's pattern-recognition process?

If we look at the human mind as a pattern-recognition device, what is the nature of its pattern-recognizing? And how does it differ from the majority of pattern-recognition methods we have collectively devised over the decades? These broad philosophical questions emerge from the studies of chess thought, and we propose that a major task of the mind is to engage in “experience recognition” (Linhares & Freitas, 2010). One of the basic tenets of that proposal is that pattern recognition, in cognitive science and related disciplines, does not accurately reflect human psychology. As an example, the well-known article by Chase and Simon, “perception in chess”, and the benchmark cognitive computational models of chess, by Gobet et al. were criticized. Lane and Gobet (2011) provide serious skepticism concerning some of those arguments, and here we take the opportunity to respond and expand the theoretical constructs of “experience recognition”. We postulate that the mind's pattern-recognizing process holds the following properties: it is a highly path-dependent process; it prioritizes internal encodings; it is a self-organizing process in constant change; and it constructs its future information-processing pathways by continuously recognizing the possibilities that lie within the adjacent possible.     

An Institution for Change: Developing a Family Day Unit

This paper describes the theory and structure of a day unit designed to intervene in the systems of families who present with severe or multiple problems to agencies attempting to help them, but who are difficult to engage in a therapeutic pact and unresponsive to attempts at outpatient therapy. An analysis of these families is offered in terms of the relations between internal and external boundaries and difficulties in making transitions in the daily contexts of life. The principles of the unit are described in terms of the creation of an artificial extended family, the intensification of sequence and patterns of interaction, and the making and traversing of boundaries. Particular attention is paid to the function of agency interventions in family patterns and to redefining the relationship between family and agencies.